First responder services are vital to providing emergency services at the scene of an emergency such as an accident, fire, natural disaster, etc. These first responders typically include firefighters, police officers, federal responders, paramedics, community first responders and other types of personnel. Accountability for first responders/personnel is a key concern for the first services industry.
Typically, an incident commander for a fire incident is responsible for accountability of fire related personnel involved in the incident. The incident commander depends on manual systems such as individual phone calls to initiate and manage the firefighters during an incident. This manual system wastes time as the incident commander has to manually call and/or receive calls from each responder via individual cell phones and then manually track which responder is at the incident location. Further, the incident commander is unable to know the status of the fire fighters, e.g., volunteer fire fighters, in real time. For example, absent manual communication, the incident commander is unable to know the number of firefighters responding to the incident. Nor does the incident commander have information regarding when the responding fire fighters may arrive at the incident scene. Also, using the existing manual system, the incident commander is unlikely to know about personnel from various departments like medical, police, federal agents and utility in real time.
One existing solution allows for the use of a proprietary wireless device or special equipment that relays the current location of the wireless device and a status to the incident commander. However, this solution has deficiencies when it comes to communications among the responders and aspects of notification to the incident commander.